This disclosure relates generally to social networking systems, and in particular to recommending connections between users and objects on a social networking system.
A social networking system allows its users to connect to and communicate with other social networking system users. Users may create profiles on a social networking system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information, and share this information with other social networking system users by posting content on the social networking system or otherwise allowing other users to access this information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of social networking systems and the increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by social networking systems, a social networking system provides an ideal forum for advertisers to increase awareness about products or services by presenting advertisements to social networking system users. Similarly, a social networking system allows groups to increase awareness about causes, events, or other information by providing information about themselves to the social networking system.
Commonly, to distribute information through a social networking system, a social networking system user generates an object maintained by the social networking system and posts content to object. For example, an organization generates a page maintained by the social networking system and posts news or photographs or responds to comments from other social networking system users via the page. Users of the social networking system may establish a connection with the page to receive updates and content from that page. Creating and maintaining objects, such as pages, may require a significant investment of resources by a user. For example, allocating time for providing continuous interaction with social networking system users via the page. Often, a threshold amount of interaction with an object offsets the resources used to create and maintain the object.
Conventionally, a social networking system recommends an object to additional social networking system users based on common attributes, such as interests and demographic information, between users connected to the object and the additional users. Social networking systems may also recommend objects to all users connected to a user currently connected to an object or determine a topic associated with an object and identify additional users based on the topic. However, for pages with less than a threshold number of connections to users, information associated with users currently connected to the object may be insufficient for normal extrapolation and conventional recommendation methods. For example, there are an insufficient number of common attributes between users connected to the object to accurately identify additional users likely to be interested in the object. Conversely, attributes that are irrelevant to determining a user's likely interest in an object may be over-represented by the users connected to the object due to random fluctuations. Further, recommending a page to all social networking system users connected to a user currently connected to an object may result in recommendation of the page to users with no interest in the object that are unlikely to establish a connection with the page. It is also impractical to determine a topic associated with an object and use the topic to identify users to receive recommendations to connect to the object. For example, the language of text associated with the object may be unknown or the object may be newly created with little associated text or other information.